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Work Better In Outlook's Tasks

BY STANLEY ZAROWIN

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Q. I use the Tasks feature in
Microsoft Outlook to keep a schedule of files—both documents and
spreadsheets—that I must open and review in the weeks ahead. Although
the feature is a handy tool for alerting me, I wonder if there is a
more efficient way to accomplish that chore. Also, each time I open
Tasks , all the listed to-do items are shown with
their due dates. Isn’t there a way to make it show only the items that
are due today, or those that are late, so I don’t have to wade through
the entire list?

A. Yes, there’s a neat way to evoke Tasks
to address your first question. Because Outlook is tightly
integrated with Word, you can command Tasks to remind
you not only to open a file on the day, hour and even minute you
choose, but it can actually locate it and then open it for you. Here’s
how:

Open the target file—either Word, Excel or any other Microsoft
application. Then evoke the Reviewing toolbar by
clicking on View, Toolbar and Reviewing
, which looks like this:

Click on the Tasks icon (the third
from the left: it looks like a checkmark on a clipboard) to bring up
this screen:

Then fill in the appropriate boxes—setting the Due date
, checking the Reminder box and the time you
want to be alerted. Notice also that you can set it to open on
recurring dates. Or you can assign the task to someone else and you
can configure it as a project with a status report and an assigned
completion date.

Now, to respond to your second question: Can you get Outlook to show
only current to-do tasks?

Tasks can be configured in many different ways. The simplest (the
Outlook default), shows each task alphabetically with the due date
(overdue tasks are colored in red). It looks like this:

But if you click on View, Current View , Outlook
will list the variations—putting tasks in categories and determining
their stage of completion—which looks like this:

You can even show what tasks are due within the next seven days,
which looks like this:

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